College of Arts & Humanities
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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.
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Item TONIGHT WE MAY WIN: CHALLENGING THE UNIVERSAL IN QUEER EMBODIMENT AND PERFORMANCE(2024) Steinberg, Rebecca Anne; Keefe, Maura; Dance; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)I sit in this chair how I always do, snug to the left side. I feel the warm hum of my laptop resting on my thighs. I feel the external rotation of my hips that allows my legs to casually cross with my feet cradled by the ottoman. I feel the spiral of my spine supporting a slightly forward head that looks down at the computer screen as I simultaneously sense the weight of chronic pain pooling heavy in my tired bones. I come to write words on this page through a commitment to embodiment as a state of profound possibility. As dance scholar Susan Foster suggests in her essay Choreographing History, “I am a body writing, I am a bodily writing.” I write through, with, and from embodiment. I define embodiment as a state where one has a heightened consciousness of their sensorium through acknowledged sensation. This state of awareness through sensation grounds the “self” in the body. Through this lens, embodiment is a mobilization that has the power to redefine how queerness is enacted and perceived through the medium of live performance. My dance thesis work, Tonight, we, may win, wields the social commentary of this position of audience privilege as farce. In this work, the dancers engage in what I’ve named “performing performativity.” Performing performativity makes transparent the exchange of currency between audience member and performer. Performing performativity functions in Tonight, we, may win as both a lens through which to view the performance and a performative state the dancers enact. The performers and the choreographer together have the power to enact possibility through this viable exchange. The potential of this enacted possibility is extensive, complex, nuanced, and political. It is an exchange that requires a book of its own to justly unpack. Although this is not the space for that unpacking, this is a space where I utilize my thesis choreography as a primary example where the power of possibility through embodiment is examined thoroughly through various theoretical lenses and multiple works of performance art. The epicenter of this physical and theoretical research revolves around the development and execution my thesis choreography, Tonight, we, may win, performed February 16-18, 2024 at University of Maryland, College Park. The enacted examples of a body first politic are constructed in this research through the vehicle of my choreographic work. I enact a body first politic in my work and I use the following chapters to bring in the choreographic voices of both my own work and dance makers and performers who succeed in challenging the impositions of the cisheteropartriarchy through queer embodiment. In the first chapter I provide an introduction the theoretical and chorographic groundwork of this world through the lens of queer embodied subjecthood. In Chapter 2, I use a solo work I created in 2022, titled Soft Caution, to activate choreography as feminist knowledge production through movement analysis and feminist theory. In the third chapter, I evoke failure as both a queer action and choreographic tool and argue for queerness as a technology in live performance. I bring in the choreographic works of Age & Beauty: Part 3 by Miguel Gutierrez and Black Hole by Shamel Pitts as examples of live performances that make queerness as a technology visibly tangible. In Chapter 4, I closely analyze the lyrics of “I Don’t Care Much” from the musical Cabaret through black feminism, performance studies, queer studies, and beyond to dissect the thin façade of queer apathy in its application to performance, queerness, communal grief, and more. In the final chapter, I excavate both the process and the product of my thesis choreography Tonight, we, may win. Through movement analysis and rehearsal reflections I endeavor to add depth and dimension to the ephemeral world created and left on stage during my thesis concert. This research privileges embodiment, communal care, and queerness through the vehicle of live performance to argue for the enactment of inclusive and equitable futures on the stage and beyond.Item They 'Boast of Dressing Like Gentlemen': Cross-Dressing, Print Culture, and Nineteenth-Century Gender Ideology(2024) Hemphill, Julia Kay; Lyons, Clare A; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Nineteenth-century gender roles were very strict but cross-dressing challenged these extremely binary roles, often being written about in different forms of print media. The press published stories about cross-dressing people in different ways depending on the actions they took in male attire. Soldier women cross-dressed and entered the military, but were not reprimanded for their decisions because their amount of time in male attire was perceived to be finite and because they were performing a service for their country. Women and male-presenting people who wore male attire and went into male workplaces, took wives, and became heads of household were highly reprimanded in the press in lengthy articles and short stories. Finally, women who wore the reform dress and liberated themselves from enslavement in male attire were spoken about in the press in two competing ways, with people supporting their transgressions and others not. Looking at the different ways that print media discussed these women and male-presenting people is important for looking at how gender roles were structured, and for understanding why powerful men were only threatened by certain cross-dressers.Item The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care(2024) Hofmann, Anne Elizabeth; Guerrero, Perla; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)"The Laboring Scholar: Community College Geographies and the Politics of Care" is an institutional ethnography that investigates the personal, political, and economic costs to student caregivers seeking a college degree. Through a critical analysis of student interviews and a close examination of community college structures and histories, I deploy an interdisciplinary, qualitative methodology that seeks to topple and contest previous ways of researching two-year collegiate structures in the U.S. I argue that, internally, community colleges offer intermittent respites from the physical and emotional labor of caregiving by being locations of intellectual invigoration and professionalization for students; however, I also address how community colleges’ positioning within larger regional and global political economies ultimately renders them stations of stagnation for many students, especially those with the most overlapping needs and markers of difference. To analyze these concepts, I use an interpretive framework that threads theories of disinvestment, structural exclusion, and predatory inclusion, to explore the use of the term “care,” which is used flexibly across institutional and everyday life to recruit students and animate collegiate recruiting and retention initiatives. I trace the link between two-year schools’ reputation as both places of “opportunity” and “second chances,” and as a stigmatized alternative to “real college.” I do so by examining the language and visual arguments deployed by colleges’ public-facing websites, as situated within broader historical-political narratives about community colleges, and by conducting in-depth interviews with caregiving students. I find that political and popular beliefs regarding studenthood and care work are internalized by students, particularly those with the fewest financial and time resources. Additionally, the overlap between race, gender, and unpaid care work aligns with those students who are the least likely to graduate from college and the most likely to accrue significant debt and physical or mental distress due to their attempts. The study triangulates institutional histories, neoliberal rhetorics of education and success, and student caregiver testimony to conclude that unpaid care labor for biological or chosen family is simultaneously a primary barrier, a fundamental source of personal joy, and a possible location of subversive power for community college students seeking a post-secondary credential.Item Made Visible: Women Artists and the Performance of Femininity in Modern Japanese Art, 1900-1930(2024) Wies, Lillian T; Volk, Alicia; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation offers a new framework for understanding individual Japanese women artists’ work and the systems of gender oppression that characterized modern Japanese art. It does so by engaging with the visualization of Japanese women artists in the early twentieth century. In response to societal anxiety about the increase of women artists in the perceived male domain of the professional art world, women artists were pressured to conform to standards of normative femininity. Those standards, I argue, can be united under a single archetype, the “female artist,” which came to dominate the visual representation and social imagining of women artists. This study offers a nuanced investigation into the reciprocal relationship between women artists and the “female artist” by focusing on four establishment women painters: Kajiwara Hisako, Shima Seien, Yoshida Fujio, and Kametaka Fumiko. Chapter One establishes the ideological grounding that defined women artists by their gender and pressured them to perform hegemonic femininity, thereby creating the marginalized “female artist” archetype. Chapter Two explores the “female artist” as a visual type, established through photographic reproductions of women artists in women’s magazines and by a painted representation of the type by Kajiwara Hisako. The chapter evaluates the complex ways women artists participated in the construction of the visual type, arguing that women made micro-adjustments to the type that valorized women’s artistic skill even as they upheld oppressive gender ideals. Chapter Three details Shima Seien’s use of self-portraiture to protest the dehumanizing elements of the “female artist” archetype and assert an alternative vision of herself as an artist and individual. Chapter Four considers Yoshida Fujio’s embrace of the “female artist” as part of a journey towards personal and artistic self-determination. The Coda uses the case study of Kametaka Fumiko and the false attribution of her self-portrait, Hanare yuku kokoro, to her deceased husband, Watanabe Yohei, to reflect on how the “female artist” archetype continues to diminish women artists’ position within scholarship. The goal of this study is to make visible the diverse ways modern Japanese women artists negotiated systemic gender discrimination in an effort to recover a sense of their agency and individuality.Item WOMEN, LANGUAGE, AND WOMEN AS LANGUAGE: THE PARADOXICAL DOMESTICITY AND SEXUALITY OF MUSLIM WOMEN AND URDU IN POST-1857 INDIAN LITERATURE AND NATIONAL DISCOURSE(2023) Taha, Fatima; Ray, Sangeeta; Comparative Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Although, since the late 1980s, much attention has been paid to the woman/mother as nation trope in multicultural colonial and post-colonial scholarship, what remains largely unexplored is the concept of woman as language functioning as scaffold for a gendered, cultural-linguistic nationalism deployed by Hindu Indians in colonial India. These “language woman,” a term political scientist Asha Sarangi coined in 2009, are diametrically opposed: the feminine anthropomorphic dutiful, mother Hindi, fit to represent India, and the unruly, courtesan Urdu who has no place in the incipient nation. In the last decade, scholarly engagement with Begum Urdu has been limited to structuring this characterization as demeaning, with Indian Muslims failing to subvert the marginalized linguistic representation in the fundamentally Hindi-speaking, Hindu project of the Indian nation state. Such a gender essentialist reading of anthropomorphic Urdu perpetuates the very androcentric society-approved gender roles it seeks to denounce, aligning with colonial Indian nationalists’ and British imperialists’ myopic ideology of one appropriate type of woman. Why must the courtesan lack agency or respectability and require reformation? This project offers an alternative view of Begum Urdu, recasting the language courtesan as empowered through the application of, among others, Foucault’s theory on authorized forms of sexuality eventually rupturing societal norms combined with sociolinguist Robin Lakoff’s interpretations of authoritative woman’s language viewed from both inside and outside the socio-political frame encompassing it. Drawing on feminist, linguistic, and colonial studies and bridging them with the concept of metonymy through contiguity in prose realism, this work offer a new metaphorical reading of Muslim female characters as representing both the Indian Muslim woman and Urdu in seven Urdu prose realist works: Ratan Nath Sarshar’s Fasana-e-Azad; Abdul Halim Sharar’s Flora Florinda; Nazir Ahmed Dehlvi’s Mirat-ul Uroos, Banaat-ul Naash, Taubat-un Nasuh, and Fasana-e-Mubtala; and finally, Muhammad Rusva’s Umrao Jan Ada and Junoon-e-Intezaar in which the metaphorical language woman is transformed into a real, round character and woman in the real world who functions with authority and agency as not only a character but an author. The Muslim and Urdu-language woman who emerges from these texts in the latter half of the 19th century gradually mesh the spheres of acceptable domestic sexuality and disreputable public sexuality to conceive a woman, who despite being untethered from societal norms, is a compelling representation of Muslim women and Urdu. In restructuring courtesan Urdu as reputable, this dissertation corrects scholarships’ sustainment of the linguistic hierarchy of Hindi over Urdu and the colonial symbolic Indian Hindu woman over her Muslim counterpart. Dismantling the British imperial and Indian colonial construction of a debased Urdu is imperative to redress the continued global devaluation of Urdu and even its speakers, including in Pakistan, where Urdu is the sole national and one of the two official languages. This dissertation answers Gyatri Spivak’s question of if the subaltern woman can speak with a resounding “yes, she can” and explores the various ways in which the marginalized and repressed can use language as a tool in an attempt to dismantle colonialism and subvert the authority of colonial oppressors while creating a singular identity, much in the way Aamir Mufti approaches the power of language.Item Like I'm Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation(2023) Lundy-Harris, Amira Naima; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Like I’m Kin to Him: Black Trans Publics, Relational Bonds, and Collective Creation traces a history of Black trans relationality in the United States since the 1970’s, investigating what possibilities these connections offer, examining what challenges they present, and exploring what they might mean for the making of the self. This dissertation utilizes a mixed-methods approach, bringing together archival readings, literary analysis, and interviews to theorize the creation and cultivation of Black trans kinship bonds. Taking up Black trans studies, digital studies, public spheres theory, and kinship studies across disparate yet interconnected media contexts, the project tracks how Black trans people meet each other (from support groups to parties to YouTube), how we come to see each other as family, and how these connections help shape who we understand ourselves to be. This dissertation looks to four different sites— a home built for trans youth, a memoir, a social media platform, and a contemporary movement—and explores what kind of shelter they may offer. To this end, the chapters of Like I'm Kin to Him weave together to elucidate a genealogy of Black trans community and life over the last 50 years.Item SOME OF US ARE STARING AT THE STARS: SPECULATIVE FICTION, FANDOM, AND TRANS IMAGINATION(2023) Hagen, Damien; Lothian, Alexis; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Some of us are staring at the stars: Speculative Fiction, Fandom, and Trans Imagination takes up the multiple ways that trans and nonbinary people have used speculative fiction as a survival strategy and worldbuilding tool. Through engagement with trans and nonbinary fans and creators of imaginative works, Damien shows how speculative fiction has powerful material effects for trans lives. Primary attention is given to the possibilities contained in media that was not created to be explicitly “transgender,” but was experienced and read as such through a “trans imaginary.” Damien’s research methods are interdisciplinary, incorporating the use of autoethnography, focus groups, close readings, and thematic analysis. Chapters include an analysis of regeneration as trans possibility in the TV series Doctor Who, an inquiry into shared experiences among trans and nonbinary fans deriving from focus group interviews, an examination of the ways the genre of “body horror” in film and television has been used as a tool for processing and dealing with experiences of body dysphoria, and an analysis of the trans world building possibilities in Blue Delliquanti’s Oh Human Star and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s Manhunt.Item Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage(2023) Starr, Brittany Noelle Schoedel; Enoch, Jessica; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“Modeling Wise Angers Online: Generation Z Activists and Their Digital Rhetorics of Feminist Rage” works at the nexus of feminist theory, digital media studies, and rhetoric to investigate how teen and young adult activists use 21st century social media technologies to challenge the sexist, racist, ageist, and ableist anger norms that disenfranchise young women in the public sphere. Each chapter theorizes what I call a “wise anger” strategy that its principal subject deploys to generate rhetorical agency for angry girl activists and change oppressive anger norms. The activists I examine are Greta Thunberg, Thandiwe Abdullah, and Shina Novalinga. While their causes range from the climate crisis to racial justice and Indigenous rights, and their primary platforms in my case studies are Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok, respectively, they all make innovative, strategic use of digital affordances to reframe young women’s anger in public discourse. Examining datasets I compiled from the activists’ social media posts between 2018-2022, I use grounded theory and rhetorical analysis to identify patterns in the anger expressions in the multimodal, multilayered posts. I read the patterns through feminist and Black feminist theories of oppressive anger norms (Jaggar, Ahmed, Traister, Chemaly, Lorde, Cooper, Judd, Collins), cultural rhetorical frameworks (Powell et al.; Karetak, Tester, and Tagalik) and youth activist rhetorical frameworks (Applegarth, Hesford, Taft, Dingo). This dissertation is premised on the understanding that emotions have a biological basis, but are constructed socially, rhetorically, and culturally and thus tend to be scripted in ways that reproduce asymmetrical relations of power (Aristotle, Dixon, Fine, Gross, Harrington, Koerber). Ultimately, I develop a theory of wise anger as an angry response to injustice that is intelligent, informed, constructive, justice-oriented, hope-driven, rational, reasonable, and moral. The wise anger these youth activists model through their digital rhetorics on social media is part of a genealogy of feminist rage that envisions and enacts a more inclusive, more livable world.Item From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction(2023) Schollaert, Jeannette; Walter, Christina; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)“From Censors to Shouts: Ecologies of Abortion in American Fiction” registers the urgent need to revisit the literary methods of abortion storytelling in multiethnic American women’s fiction with a close attention to one of its most significant tropes: the herbal abortifacients that signify as both code and medicine, recalling the Victorian “language of flowers” as well as essentialist metaphorical connections between femininity, reproduction, and the natural world. This project traces the literary history of herbal abortifacients from abortion’s censorship and criminalization in the nineteenth century to present-day movements to reclaim or “shout” one’s abortion. The fictional mentions of plants known to be abortifacients demonstrate how literature can communicate reproductive and plant knowledge. “From Censors to Shouts” also offers a window into how the practice of domestic herbalism (a gendered and often racialized practice) evolves over the course of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries by pairing a cultural historical analysis of the herbs themselves alongside considerations of how authors’ fictional deployments of these herbs work towards visions of reproductive and environmental justice. “From Censors to Shouts” considers fiction from multiethnic American women writers including Sarah Orne Jewett, Edith Summers Kelley, Josephine Herbst, Marge Piercy, Octavia Butler, Ntozake Shange, Jamaica Kincaid, Toni Morrison, Ana Castillo, and Kali Fajardo-Anstine. The fictional depiction of herbal abortifacients reveals our continued attention to plant knowledge and self-managed herbal abortion. Understanding how these plant names and knowledges have remained crucial rhetorical, cultural, and visual signifiers of abortion access is vital to understanding the reclamation of these knowledges as we re-commit to the fight for abortion rights and reproductive justice amidst a new legal landscape.Item Women's Studies Worldwide: Cartographies of Transnational Academic Feminism(2023) Montague, Clara; Tambe, Ashwini; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation retells the history of women’s studies from a global perspective, challenging traditional U.S. and Eurocentric narratives about this emerging interdisciplinary field. Beginning with questions about why women’s, gender, and sexuality studies has incited backlash across a range of cultural and geographic locations, this study draws on transnational feminist theory and higher education research to argue for a more broadly situated understanding of academic feminism. Chapter One describes the creation of a digital map featuring more than nine hundred women’s studies degree programs and research centers in seventy countries. Using cartography software including ArcGIS and StoryMaps, this component offers a broader perspective on the field’s distribution than has previously been documented in the scholarly literature, revealing new insights about how women’s studies has grown and contracted as a result of shifting geopolitical trends. Chapter Two examines several examples of collaborative autobiographic writing to show how variously situated authors construct particular narratives about this field. Drawing on the concept of political grammar, this section demonstrates how edited collections about the founding of women’s studies and articles about cross-border collaborations use credentializing and contextualizing discourse in contrast with ideas of development and colleagueship. Chapter Three discusses three international institutes that grew from the University of Maryland’s Curriculum Transformation Project using archival research and oral histories. Involving academic feminist scholars from China, South Korea, the Caribbean, South Africa, Israel, and Hungary, this case study of international exchange demonstrates the complexity of enacting women’s studies across difference. The dissertation concludes with recommendations for how practitioners in the United States might better enact ethical collaborative relationships with colleagues and institutions situated in other national, cultural, and linguistic contexts. Rather than viewing U.S. women’s studies as a blueprint than can be exported and applied elsewhere, this study concludes by arguing for mutual accountability, centering connections across the Global South, and sharing resources as strategies for building effective coalitions that will nurture the field moving forward.